New statues honour Canadian-born basketball inventor

Sculptor Elden Tefft has completed his latest sculpture, a bronze casting of Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. The statue is headed to Springfield College, in Springfield, Mass., where Naismith invented the game before coming to KU.

Photograph by: Mike Yoder
, Journal-World

A larger-than-life statue of Canadian-born basketball inventor James Naismith will be unveiled later this year in the eastern Ontario town of Almonte, part of a unique, two-country tribute marking the three most important sites in the life of an Ottawa Valley boy who became a global sports icon.

Identical bronze statues showing Naismith seated on a bench with a ball and two peach baskets — his inspired choice for nets in the original version of the sport — have been created for the site in downtown Almonte, for a second site near the Springfield, Mass., gymnasium where the first games were played in 1891, and for the University of Kansas campus where Naismith spent most of his career coaching students and guiding basketball’s early evolution.

It was in Almonte, about 50 kilometres west of Ottawa, where Naismith grew up in the 1860s playing a schoolyard game called “Duck on a Rock,” which involved high, arcing stone tosses to knock another rock off a large boulder.

In December 1891, that memory led Naismith — then a young, McGill University-educated phys-ed teacher working at Springfield College — to invent an indoor sport for the winter months based on throwing a ball toward an elevated goal.

The statue project was initiated by the distinguished U.S. sculptor and professor Elden Tefft, the 83-year-old founder of the University of Kansas sculpture program who grew up a stone’s throw from Naismith’s house in Lawrence, Kan. — the city where the Almonte native lived for decades and was buried after his death at age 78 in 1939.

“I just lived across the back yard from his last home, so I’m pretty well-immersed in the Naismith story,” Tefft told Postmedia News. “He led such an exemplary life, and he meant much more to the university than just basketball.”

Tefft says his sculpture depicts an older Naismith reflecting on his legacy, “humble and grateful for people being so interested in his game.”

The Springfield College sculpture was the first of the three to be installed. It was dedicated in April at a ceremony attended by several Naismith descendants, including his 83-year-old grandson Stuart Naismith of Binghamton, N.Y.

“Basketball is James Naismith’s gift to humanity,” college president Richard Flynn said at the unveiling. “Naismith is not only Springfield College’s most famous alumnus; he is a personification of Springfield College’s core values. He believed strongly in the equilateral development of the spirit, mind and body, and in living a life of leadership in service to others.”

Allen Rae, president of the Almonte-based Naismith Foundation, said the town’s version of the sculpture is expected to arrive in August and be formally unveiled in 2011 to mark the 150th anniversary of Naismith’s birth in 1861.

Rae says the design expertly “captures the essence of the man” — an accomplished medical doctor, pastor and educator — and shows Naismith as a quiet, comfortable figure “who never beat his own drum about his marvellous invention.”

The discounted $30,000 cost of the Almonte statue — significantly underwritten by Tefft and other Kansas-based backers of the project — is being shouldered by the municipality of Mississippi Mills, a handful of other major local sponsors and many individual contributors.

Remarkably, the very boulder Naismith and his childhood playmates are believed to have used for their games of Duck on a Rock is exhibited in an Almonte museum.

Distinctly spherical, the massive granite artifact once sat next to a country schoolhouse before being trucked to town for protection and display.

Three public sites in central Almonte are being considered for the town’s newest Naismith memorial, which Rae says will include both the 450-kilogram statue and a 1,500-kilogram granite base.

Almonte municipal officials and heritage buffs have long viewed the Naismith connection as an important tourism draw for the community and the country.

“It’s a real treasure for a Canadian to have invented the second-most popular sport in the world,” said Rae, noting how basketball now rivals soccer as a low-cost “people’s game” played in more than 200 countries around the world.

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Sculptor Elden Tefft has completed his latest sculpture, a bronze casting of Dr. James Naismith, the inventor of basketball. The statue is headed to Springfield College, in Springfield, Mass., where Naismith invented the game before coming to KU.

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